Dynamic spectrum sharing with 3.5 GHz CBRS network

A tremendous amount of mid-band spectrum is opening up for enterprises, mobile network operators, cable operators, and new players, Kurt Schaubach, CTO of Federated Wireless, thanks to dynamic spectrum sharing with Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS).

 This video covers:
* The CBRS ecosystem and commercial rollout timeline
* Who is Federated Wireless and what are its key technologies
* How CBRS creates access to spectrum for densification of existing networks and entry for new players
* CBRS in 4G and 5G scenarios

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Federated Wireless ready to launch its 3.5 GHz CBRS network

Federated Wireless is ready to begin initial commercial deployment (ICD) of its Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum management services to more than 20 customers in both urban and rural markets across 36 states in the U.S. immediately upon FCC public notice of approval.

Federated Wireless confirmed that it is working with customers and partners that represent each of the market segments poised to benefit from this massive swath of midband spectrum. These include Verizon, Charter, American Tower, Airspan, Boingo Wireless, Cambium Networks, Cradlepoint, Contour Networks, Ericsson, ExteNet Systems, Geoverse, JMA Wireless, Landmark Dividend, Motorola Solutions, Nokia, Samsung, Telrad and Wave Wireless.


“Customers from all areas of business across the U.S. will begin to reap the benefits of the higher throughput, improved availability and low barrier-to-entry for high-performance CBRS services made available through shared spectrum in the 3.5GHz range,” said Iyad Tarazi, CEO of Federated Wireless. “We applaud the FCC for its leadership in opening this spectrum for general shared use and its stewardship in bringing the industry and all of its various players to this critical juncture. CBRS will be a huge boon to innovation and help to accelerate new business models.”

“Shared spectrum solutions like CBRS allow us to expand wireless coverage and capacity, especially in dense, high-trafficked areas such as airports and stadiums. The band is part of Boingo’s wireless portfolio and will be key for powering connectivity in the 5G era. We’re pleased to see the FCC’s commitment to opening more spectrum and are excited to begin ICD of CBRS for Boingo’s venue partners.” – Dr. Derek Peterson, Chief Technology Officer at Boingo and Board Member, CBRS Alliance.

https://www.federatedwireless.com/

Federated Wireless raises $51M for CBRS spectrum management

Wednesday, September 04, 2019  CBRS, Funding, Spectrum, Start-Ups  

Federated Wireless, a start-up based in Arlington, Virginia, announced $51 million in Series C funding for its Citizens Band Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum management services.

Federated Wireless highlighted its role in the development of CBRS, including:

• Co-founding the CBRS Alliance
• Being the first to complete deployment of a nationwide Environmental Sensing Capability (ESC) network
• Readying multiple customers to deliver CBRS services using its Spectrum Controller (Spectrum Access System or SAS) when commercial services begin this month

The latest funding included contributions from existing investors Allied Minds, American Tower and GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, in addition to new investors Pennant Investors and SBA Communications. The

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Verizon boosts Virtual Communications Express with VoIP, SD-WAN, Webex Calling

Verizon is rolling out enterprise-specific enhancements to its premier cloud calling solution - Virtual Communications Express (VCE).

Verizon is delivering its VCE solution over its global VoIP service, and reinforced with hosted or premise based SD-WAN connectivity. The solution is also now available across Asia, Europe and the U.S.

Verizon is also now offering VCE via a Cisco Collaboration Flex Plan - Webex Calling. This combines hosted UC&C capabilities and Verizon’s VoIP connectivity with the added flexibility of Cisco’s Flex Plan licensing model. Verizon is the only carrier in the market that supports Cisco Webex Calling in Webex Teams on a private MPLS network providing enterprises with greater security for their business communications.

“To compete globally, businesses need their entire global workforce, whether office based or mobile, to be working at their optimum capacity. First class collaboration capabilities are vital,” comments Alla Reznik, executive director of customer experience, global products and services, Verizon. “By leveraging Verizon’s global network strength and market leading VoIP portfolio, we have developed an enhanced collaboration solution that delivers powerful hosted UC&C features underpinned by superior network connectivity and performance. This enterprise-grade solution will take global business collaboration to the next level.”

"Cisco is excited to be partnering with Verizon and we're delighted to deliver the power of a Single Platform bringing together Webex Calling, Teams and Meetings as the best Enterprise Collaboration solution for our customers. Verizon’s specific enhancements to VCE enables enterprises to heighten employee collaboration by providing a more productive, secure and cohesive environment, " comments Sri Srinivasan, Cisco senior vice president and general manager, collaboration.

SD-WAN: Linking Policy to Carrier Networks for Improved Customer Experience

Thursday, August 15, 2019  MEF, SD-WAN, Verizon, Video  

MEF Annual Meeting – July 2019, Shawn Hakl, Senior Vice President Business Products, Verizon, highlights the importance of the industry’s new SD-WAN services standard published by MEF. Among other things, standardization will help link policy to carrier networks to deliver a greater customer experience.

“SD-WAN is really the control plane for which virtualized functions will be implemented. As we see more capabilities built into the intelligent network – the Software-Defined Network – at the core of carriers, SD-WAN will really be the way that you interface policy with the carrier network.” This will be expressed in ways like enabling users to select slices in a 5G network.

“The work that the MEF is doing around standardization of the SD-WAN spec just makes it easier for that integration to work across multiple types of underlying transport. And what that means to the end user is that it lets them get an overall experience from the network relative to their apps. So you can support a broader range of use cases with specialized needs coming across the network. You can build a better end-to-end application experience, meaning you’ll hit price points more effectively and, more importantly, your guaranteed service resiliency and service capability in an always-on connected world.”

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ONF's Stratum Project goes Open Source

The ONF's Stratum SDN project has been released as open source under the Apache 2.0 open source license.

Stratum is an open source, silicon-independent switch operating system for software-defined networks that runs on a variety of switching silicon and various whitebox switch platforms. 

The ONF said the goal of Stratum is to avoid the vendor lock-in found with today’s data planes that feature proprietary silicon interfaces and closed software APIs that tend to lock operators into using a specific hardware technology. The strict contractual relationship of a P4-based interface between a Stratum switch and its controller ensure that the switch can be swapped with a spectrum of alternatives (even those with different switching silicon from a diversity of vendors) without need for controller modification or network retest and validation.  Never before has it been possible to grow and upgrade installations and adopt the latest advancements in switching silicon at the speed of cloud development.

Stratum also exposes a set of next-generation SDN interfaces including P4, P4Runtime, OpenConfig, gNMI and gNOI, enabling programmability of forwarding behaviors, zero-touch operations and full automated life-cycle management. This makes Stratum a key enabler for ONF’s next-generation SDN initiative.

“Bringing project Stratum to open source is an important milestone in furthering the ONF’s open networking movement,” said Guru Parulkar, Executive Director, ONF. “Stratum provides a consistent set of northbound Next-Gen SDN interfaces even as it runs on a wide selection of hardware platforms leveraging a variety of switching silicon. As such, Stratum is becoming the common substrate for ONF’s Next-Gen SDN stack, enabling rapid innovation, zero touch operations and a robust hardware ecosystem.”

https://www.opennetworking.org/stratum/

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Vertical Systems: Mid-Year 2019 U.S. Carrier Ethernet LEADERBOARD

The top seven companies on Vertical Systems Group's newly published mid-year 2019 U.S. Carrier Ethernet LEADERBOARD are (in rank order based on mid-year 2019 retail port share): CenturyLink, AT&T, Verizon, Spectrum Enterprise, Comcast, Windstream and Cox. This mid-year LEADERBOARD roster increases from six to seven as Cox moves up from the Challenge Tier.

To qualify for a rank on this LEADERBOARD, network providers must have four percent (4%) or more of the U.S. Ethernet services market. Shares are measured based on the number of billable retail customer ports installed. Vertical Systems Group's Ethernet port share analysis includes the following six service segments from the market perspective of what service providers are offering and enterprise customers are purchasing: Ethernet DIA (Dedicated Internet Access), E-Access to IP/MPLS VPN, Ethernet Private Lines, Ethernet Virtual Private Lines, Metro LAN, and WAN VPLS.

"In the first half of 2019 the U.S. Ethernet market showed steady port growth just above five percent," said Rick Malone, principal of Vertical Systems Group. "The three Cable MSOs ranked on the LEADERBOARD - Spectrum Enterprise, Comcast and Cox - had the highest port growth in this period, spurred in part by SD-WAN customer demand for Ethernet DIA connections to the public Internet."

In addition to the LEADERBOARD providers, all other companies selling Ethernet services in the U.S. are segmented into two tiers as measured by port share.

The Challenge Tier includes providers with between 1% and 4% share of the U.S. retail Ethernet market. For mid-year 2019, the following six companies attained a position in the Challenge Tier (in alphabetical order): Altice USA, Cogent, Frontier, GTT, Sprint and Zayo.

The Market Player tier includes all providers with port share below 1%. Companies in the Market Player tier include the following providers (in alphabetical order): Alaska Communications, American Telesis, Atlantic Broadband, BT Global Services, Cincinnati Bell, Consolidated Communications, Crown Castle Fiber, DQE Communications, Expedient, FiberLight, FirstLight, Fusion, Global Cloud Xchange, Great Plains Communications, Logix Fiber Networks, LS Networks, Masergy, MetTel, Midco, Momentum Telecom, NTT America, Orange Business, RCN Business, Segra, Sparklight Business, Tata, TDS Telecom, Telstra, TPx, Unite Private Networks, US Signal, WOW!Business and other companies selling retail Ethernet services in the U.S. market.

http://www.verticalsystems.com

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Citrix enhances its SD-WAN via partnership with Palo Alto Networks

Citrix is collaborating with Palo Alto Networks to enable easy deployment and management of next-generation firewalls within Citrix SD-WAN.

“Applications and workloads are migrating to the cloud at a very aggressive rate and security needs to follow them,” said Chalan Aras, Vice President, SD-WAN and Intelligent Traffic Management, Citrix. “With Palo Alto Networks, we can deliver an advanced SD-WAN security solution that enables companies to protect users, data and applications across branches, data centers and public clouds in a simple, flexible way.”

With the integration of the Palo Alto Networks VM-Series virtual next-generation firewalls and Prisma Access with the Citrix SD-WAN solution (formerly NetScaler SD-WAN), distributed enterprises can enhance their network and cloud protection.

Capabilities include:

• Build and enforce consistent access control policies based on applications and users across network and cloud
• Automate provisioning of Palo Alto Networks VM-Series next-generation firewall (NGFW) on the Citrix 1100 appliance, as a virtual network function (VNF)
• Automate connections to Palo Alto Networks Prisma Access cloud-based firewalls for consistent policy enforcement
• Streamline provisioning of multi-layer security services from Citrix SD-WAN Orchestrator, available via Citrix Cloud
• Apply security zone segmentation to protect users, applications, and data

“In today’s hybrid, multi-cloud world, security needs to be as agile as your applications, data and users,” said Adam Geller, senior vice president, Products, Palo Alto Networks. “Together with Citrix, we can deliver an integrated set of products that provide a consistent level of protection to users across the network and both public and private clouds.”

http://www.citrix.com/sdwan

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WaveOptics raises $39 million for diffractive waveguides for AR

WaveOptics, a start-up specializing in diffractive waveguides for wearable augmented reality (AR) devices, raised US$39m (£30m) in an oversubscribed Series C funding round.

WaveOptics has developed patented near-eye transparent displays that allow device manufacturers to create wearable devices that combine digital imagery with the real world.

WaveOptics raised an additional $13m (£10m) in the final stage, having raised an initial $26m (£20m) in December 2018. This final stage was supported by existing investor Goertek, a global leader in the design and manufacturing of high-tech consumer electronics, and new investor Hostplus, one of the largest institutional investors in Australian venture capital.

WaveOptics is based in London.

“Completing the Series C funding is another important step for the business, enabling us to accelerate our growth to meet the increasing international customer demand. The oversubscription also validates the quality and potential of our technology to our partners and investors and is clear recognition of our leading position in the AR market. We are seeing significant progress with our customers developing their own products based on our technology. This was demonstrated in the first half of 2019 when we secured a number of significant partnerships with global OEMs and ODMs," stated David Hayes, WaveOptics CEO.

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DOCOMO trials 5G in factories with OMRON and Nokia

NTT DOCOMO is working with OMRON Corporation and Nokia to test 5G mobile communication technology inside factories, with the aim of significantly enhancing future manufacturing productivity.

During the trials, DOCOMO, OMRON and Nokia aim to prove the feasibility of using 5G connectivity to create layout-free production lines using Autonomous Mobile Robots—robots that are able to act autonomously in complex and changing environments—as well as the feasibility of human-machine collaboration inside manufacturing plants.

https://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/info/media_center/pr/2019/0910_00.html

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